So, you think you’re an environmentalist? You think you are doing everything in your power to do your part and fight climate change? But, you may be wrong. I was. Up until the beginning of the semester, I never thought the bottled water I was drinking was going to contribute to global warming. Oh, how wrong I was.
On one of the first days back to campus for the spring semester, I read an article in The Daily Free Press about a neighboring Boston school hosting a video night featuring lots of different clips about the impact of the bottled-water industry on the environment. This shocked me. While the article didn’t really detail any specifics on what the videos had to say, it still made me think. After class that day, I went back to my dorm room and did a little research on the subject. What I found was shocking.
It’s not entirely surprising that our world is becoming “globalized.” What is surprising, however, is the number of miles bottled water travels to reach its target destination. Think about it. The farther the bottled water has to travel to reach the hands of consumers, the more gas is going to be consumed to bring it there. Therefore, more greenhouse gas is going to be released into the atmosphere — just one example of the negative effects of bottled water.
It costs 10,000 times more to generate bottled water than tap water, according to a study by the Earth Policy Institute. To me, this seems like a ridiculous waste of such a valuable resource. For one, it would save everyone money to just drink tap water. Even if you think your tap water is “bad,” just buy a Brita water filter and watch the savings roll in. According to the EPI study, 1.5 million barrels of oil were needed to produce the plastic bottles for water in the United States alone. Give up your bottled water and 100,000 cars could run for a year on that energy, or electricity could be generated for 250,000 homes for 12 months. There really is a large enough water supply in the world, it seems to me, to insure that every woman, man and child can get his or her share. However, even in today’s world, this is not the case. If everyone decided to simply turn on the tap rather than buy bottled water for his or her next drink, it would certainly “free up” valuable resources for those people in greater need of fresh, clean water.
As an added disadvantage, that Poland Spring or Evian in your hand is also loaded with meaningless minerals you don’t need. This is probably to drive up the price of the water. Many studies have irrefutably proven that bottled water is no healthier than tap water. In fact, bottled water may be worse for your health.
In a Kansas Department of Health and Environment study, which studied 80 bottles of water, 100 percent had significant levels of chlorine and sodium. Sodium is, at the very least, unnecessary and probably harmful to your health. We already get enough sodium simply by eating food during the course of a day. Any use of a salt shaker incurs a positive balance of sodium in the body, so getting even more from bottled water may be doing some harm. According to the same study, 97.5 percent of the samples had nitrate, which leads to blue-baby syndrome. Approximately 32 percent had arsenic and approximately 19 percent had lead. Here’s the real kicker: 58 percent of the samples were proven to have carcinogens in their midst.
Also, not too many people know that the bottled water industry is largely unregulated, with no mandatory sampling occurring at the government level. This means bottled water can sit for significant amounts of time, potentially years, before it reaches your hands. It has even been discovered that Poland Spring water comes not from a pristine mountain spring, but from a well next to a busy highway. Clearly, from a health standpoint, it seems there is less risk taken in drinking tap water than bottled water.
The bottled water industry is also having tremendous repercussions on our current climate-change situation. Plastic takes nearly 1,000 years to degrade. Our landfills are filling up with tons of bottles because the majority of people are too lazy or ignorant to recycle, or maybe they simply don’t care. I don’t know about you, but my mind has definitely been changed. While I still have half a case of bottled water left, I will simply use it up and not let the energy generated in its production go to waste. Then, I will never buy the stuff again. I hope I have convinced you not to buy it, either.
Jessica Atchinson is a senior in the
College of Arts and Sciences.